Determinism via perspective lag

August 5 2024

I have a little theory. If you've ever delved into the concepts of philosophy, you've probably heard of determinism. Determinism is the idea that all events in the universe are inevitable, and that everything that happens is pre-determined, hence its name. Maybe events are not PRE-determined, but determined nonetheless regardless of human's pre-emptive actions, which could be considered free will, something philosophers argue may not exist as part of this theory.

With the many theories and arguments for and against the legitimacy of determinism (read here if you want a 101 on it), I present my own theory. It is not something I adhere to or staunchly defend, but it is something I found interesting to think about once I conceptualized it, and I thought it was a small idea that had enough meat on it to be worthy of a blog post and some conversations with friends.

Let's start with an example. You're playing the video game Counter Strike, and you peek around a corner. You spot another player's barrel poking out behind the door, and you decide to surprise-attack them. Long story short, you get killed and you start whining about how there's no way they could have shot you first.

An abundance of things had to happen to reach this outcome. The server has to host the content, the players have to connect to the server, the server must receive the requests, it then must establish an amount of delay to ensure that the players' actions sync up well enough, and finally, the players must respond to each other's actions after all of the content is displayed to their screen. The players then have to move their mouse and hit keys to cause actions which will be sent to the computer to send through the internet and to the server for the server to then process all of these inputs, and then send the proper reaction back to the players in the same process described. This isn't a perfect descriptor of how internet technology works, but it gets the idea across.

Let's say now that all of the server and computer-side events are happening without any kind of latency. What you see happens exactly as it happens. You are shot the exact time the other player clicks on your head.

But wait! Your reflexes; they're slow! I don't mean you're a bad player, but there is no way that your actions could possibly be as perfectly timed as this magical internet speed. Light had to travel to your eyes, your eyes had to perceive the information, your brain had to process the information, and your brain had to make connections and command your body to move too. Now, every action the body makes takes time. If not, then you'd snap everywhere faster than the speed of light and you'd melt the room around you just by how fast you fling the air around. You'd probably form a black hole, actually. Anyway, the gist of this is that even without the latency induced by technology, we as a species can't react at the perfect time to anything because we have physical latency.

I will simplify this again. You have to see, then you have to think, and then you have to move. Your actions are a result of something that already happened. Your perspective is sliding through time like a playhead on a video player (the little dot that shows what time you're on), and video players have a buffer ahead of time so the video runs smoothly as it is playing now. That video player is only playing the content that it has access to at that moment. What if our world is just like that video player's buffer and playhead?

How much of the real future already exists that we have not reacted to yet? What if there is an event or events ahead that our dot in time hasn't reached? This is the thing that feeds into the theory of determinism. Something COULD be ahead, but it is only for us to argue over whether or not there is more or less of that something. No human can definitively answer the question, obviously, but this theory must be true in at least a little amount because we know our reflexes have a buffer to it in the first place. We can record ourselves doing things in slow motion and see how much time it takes for us to respond to information that other objects can emit faster.

A slow motion camera, by some definition, has a glimpse into the future as we perceive it as it is recording. Once a human views it, everything that happened is in the past and we conclude only that our reflexes have a delay. I'm thinking bigger than that. SOMETHING in this world may surpass the fastest camera's ability to view things in a certain time. But, nothing, not even light, can display what exists ahead without some kind of lag. Whatever information about the future we can get can not be visual or audible; it has a better chance of being abstract information. If we do somehow record the future, it could be useless to humans since by the time we get this information, it may have already happened, so we didn't need the recording equipment anyway.

So, there is a limit to how much we can know. The closer we get to the truth of something, the harder it is to reach. These are the limits of human curiousity. We want to know more, but there is a limit somewhere that mankind can not break past. What if this limit is yet another argument for a divine being?

As you can see, the future is the final frontier for philosophy, religion, and debate. If humans can know all else, we still may never get to know the future. All we know is how to affect it, and even if we feel absolutely confident that something will happen if we do something in a specific way, the video probably already loaded before the playhead reached it, and all we can do is watch.

I would love to conclude this post on that sentence because I felt really clever for writing it, but I still have something to say. Humanity has not been around for very long, and in the grand scheme of the universe, we have VERY recently learned how to ask "Why?" The future, according to the past and even the present from what we know, has a strange way of subverting expectations. Media from years past may have predicted some things about now (or even predicted the nearer past to us now!) that have some truth to it, but only we know how things really have panned out since. It is entirely possible that we evolve to become more skilled speculators, and become so cosmically good at it that the future might as well be considered known, but if technology is capable of revealing how slow we are as a species in the PRESENT, then for the moment we might as well allow technology to try its hand at predicting the future.

They say the key to the future is the past. Usually "they" say that in political situations where obscuring history is the subject, but I mean it in another way. The more of the past we know, the better we are at predicting what is possible in the future. It's not a catch-all method, but since we know what we don't want because of the past, we can say that the future has what we want. That's a good prediction to make, because it will always be true somewhere, or somewhen.